Also why I always laughed at William Hague (and others’) description of the “brave men and women of #GCHQ 🤣
RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:gt5f4xsjqzwdwqsakypbknxm/post/3lrdy7w4gbk2r
#GCHQ
Sorry, how could I forget the useful idiots in the UK government and security services who have so enmeshed the two countries' intelligence and surveillance apparatuses that -- as one friend who worked at #GCHQ on secondment told me -- you can "barely tell where one ends and the other begins”.
#BigBrotherWatchVsUK
Ja, der #GCHQ auch ;)
There's a scheme that Russia is backing,
Hacking borders, disrupt aid, attacking.
A cyber invasion,
Causing such frustration,
Their actions are truly quite lacking.
#GuardianLimerick #Russia #GCHQ #Cyberwar #Hacking #Technology #Europe #Espionage #Ukraine #Aid
Mid-Book Audiobook Review: “How Spies Think” by David Omand
https://alecmuffett.com/article/113370
#DavidOmand #gchq #intelligence #surveillance
Mid-Book Audiobook Review: “How Spies Think” by David Omand
Christ, I’m having a hard time with this book, and I’m not even done / he hasn’t even gotten onto the “tech industry” parts yet. I seek greater understanding of the mindset of how Sir David Omand, GCB, former head of GCHQ, got on stage at an event I attended in 2015* and said words to the effect: “Google has all this lovely data, why should the Government not also have it, too?”
I’ve just gotten into the third part of the book which appears headed in this direction, so I will let you know.
In the meantime I would summarise the first two parts of the book as a recap of how intelligence analysts work and then an extended love-letter to Bayesian Probability and Bayesian Statistics, the tools by which UK Government intelligence analysis craft their imperfect understanding into dubious likelihoods which they then communicate to politicians using a horrendously ordained table of canned phrases, glossing over everything they don’t know with “we have no evidence that…” and then on those occasions where it all goes terribly wrong holding their hands-up to say “…it’s not our fault, guv, we only told them what believe on the basis of what little we know, and we followed all of our procedures…”
This, of course, subsequently justifies the ratchet to demand ever-increasing amounts of knowledge, in order to have greater “situational awareness” and to know more, in order to keep releasing these estimates. It’s telling that all the most laudatory parts of the book so far deal with intelligence from Soviet double-agents and/or getting into the face of criminals like Radko Mladic, whereas all the failures (e.g. the Falklands invasion) have been due to a lack of attention and/or “due care” by both politicians and intelligence officers, rather than any lack of “data”.
The whole thing, so far, is apparently underscored by the perspective that “we know what’s good for us is good for the little people, so we shall pursue what’s good for us” — and not very much big-picture cost/benefit analysis.
My father once shared a story — it may actually have been a meme of the era — about the analysis of British Government population statistics in colonial west Africa in the 1950s; it went along the lines of: “…never forget when looking at all these numbers that you may draw whatever firm conclusions you like from them, but in most instances the actual numbers were written-down on a form by the village watchman who put down whatever he damn-well pleased”.
This is at the forefront of my mind each time Omand talks about an analyst deciding how probable [any given event] is. Iain Lobban may be able to corroborate this, I’m fairly certain that our parents were in the same area, doing similar work, and knew each other.
Onto Part Three…
[*] you can see the back of my head, front row, far left
TIL: Es gibt zwei britische Journalisten, die Duncan Campbell heißen.
Einer war Kriminalreporter für den Guardian und starb kürzlich.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2025/may/16/duncan-campbell-celebrated-guardian-reporter-dies-aged-80
Der andere enthüllte die Existenz des #GCHQ und von #Echelon. Er lebt in Glasgow.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duncan_Campbell_(Journalist,_1952)
#GCHQ worker admits taking top secret data home
So, #GCHQ have 1. Interns that are 2. given TS clearance and 3. can export classified materials to external devices or storage media...
(And doing a wild qualified guess: 4. can also import malicious data into TS accredited systems).
https://therecord.media/british-intern-gchq-charged-smuggling
Keira Knightley – „Official Secrets“ (2019)
Ein wichtiger Film, denn: „Das erste Opfer des Krieges ist immer die Wahrheit.“ – Und wer, sich traut sie auszusprechen, wird bekämpft. Mit Keira Knightley, Ralph Fiennes und Rhys Ifans. (ZDF, WH)
The Dangers Lurking in the U.K.’s Plan for Electronic Eavesdropping | Lawfare | Susan Landau | …HMG zealotry against encryption leads to strategic risk
https://alecmuffett.com/article/112672
#EndToEndEncryption #HomeOffice #SusanLandau #apple #gchq #surveillance
The Dangers Lurking in the U.K.’s Plan for Electronic Eavesdropping | Lawfare | Susan Landau | …HMG zealotry against encryption leads to strategic risk
This article by former colleague Professor Susan Landau highlights the UK Government’s pervasive fear of user privacy and end to end encryption via something I was previously unaware: *breaking* from the rest of the “Five Eyes” re: mitigation of “Salt Typhoon”:
Vulnerabilities in the telephone signaling systems allowed entry into the phone networks. As I also described in Lawfare, greater centralization of wiretapping capabilities that were a result of the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act simplified the Chinese hackers’ ability to determine targets of U.S. wiretap orders. Lack of end-to-end encryption enabled their reading of text messages. In response, the “Four Eyes”—the Five Eyes, the intelligence alliance of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the U.S. with the U.K. declining to participate—issued guidance on securing communications, including, “Ensure that traffic is end-to-end encrypted to the maximum extent possible.”
This suggests impractical levels of political will against the popularisation and deployment of cryptography, for some reason.
#apple #endToEndEncryption #feed #gchq #homeOffice #surveillance #susanLandau
questo è molto interessante e non mi sorprende che a scrivere sia un giornalista di razza come #DuncanCampbell che per primo pubblicò nome del segretissimo #GCHQ,gemello inglese della #NSA:
[inglese]
NCSC, GCHQ, UK Gov't expunge advice to "use Apple encryption" — https://alecmuffett.com/article/112522
#HackerNews #NCSC #GCHQ #UKGovernment #AppleEncryption #CyberSecurity #TechNews
Jahrelange #Wirtschaftsspionage durch #NSA & #GCHQ – und Deutschland schaut zu. Keine Abkopplung von US-Diensten, keine digitale #Souveränität. Wer sich so demütigen lässt, ist nicht regierungsfähig! #DigitalesVersagen
i wonder how one feels about sharing intelligence with a country whose leader has openly expressed the wish to assimilate your country? #canada
also the more general question, how will things go forward for #fiveeyes ?
#uk #australia #canada #newzealand #anzac #gchq #nsa #cse #asio #nzsis #musk #doge #gabbard #meme #mamema #memes
@alvyntc @TechDesk @theverge The irony is, this will screw over #GCHQ officers and their sources too. Lives and liberties of even the UK's own depend on information entrusted to iCloud #E2EE. That may not be what they're supposed to use, but when does that stop anyone. When officer has a case to make, they use what the source will use. And when a source wants their network traffic to blend in, they use what the population at large uses.
And then it's just a matter of days before someone compromises a key, because the interception points each becomes high-value single-points of failure, and they inevitably access will proliferate through UK law enforcement and intelligence and military bureaucracies.
This is the same sort of agnorance (the hybrid of arrogance and ignorance) as led the narcissistic former Aussie PM Malcolm Turnbull to think his decree can supersede the mathematical impossibility of making a crypto-system that exposes the plaintext only to those adversaries in the middle that he blesses. He might as well have said "5 is prime if I say so, because I say so."
If implemented, the UK's law will get a lot of good people killed, and even more good people unjustly imprisoned, by the UK's enemies. It's a veritable wet dream of MSS and PLA and SVR and GRU and IRGC and RGB #cyberwar officers gunning for a promotion.
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